My work machine finally became eligible for the Windows 10 anniversary update yesterday so I dutifully installed it.

After loosing best part of a hour waiting for it to install, it took more precious time to re-remove all the cruft that I’d removed before and the update saw fit to re-install for you such as Zune Music, OneDrive, Cortana etc. This time however it was harder than before with more options being hidden from the UI and buried in group policy editor and AppxPackage. From what is overall a good OS, the obsession for installing bloatware is really disappointing from Microsoft.

Anyway, last night I needed to do some work so went to login remotely, but had no joy. On return to the office this morning I did some digging and sure enough the update had removed the custom firewall options that had been configured!

So if you’re applying any of the major Windows 10 updates be sure to backup your firewall settings and check it hasn’t changed them before leaving the office!

Based on Eric McCorkle’s work on adding modular boot support to EFI including adding ZFS support, which is currently in review we’ve back-ported the required changes to 10.2-RELEASE code base, which others may find useful.

Update 2015-12-11: Corrected patch URL.Update 2015-12-14: Updated code in line with #11226 of https://reviews.freebsd.org/D4515.Update 2015-01-15: Updated code in line with that which is now committed to HEAD.

We needed to update the firmware for some Intel XL710 nics which only has a Windows or Linux firmware utility ATM so we booted KNOPPIX Linux and tried to patch the firmware only to be presented with:./nvmupdate64e: No such file or directory

The binary was there, the OS was 64bit (the same as the binary) so what was going on. After much head scratching it turned out that the kernel was 64bit but userland is 32bit only for KNOPPIX meaning there was no way to run the the provided 64bit binary.

As you’ll likely have found the ports tree is now incompatible with FreeBSD before 8.4 so if you haven’t migrated off earlier versions e.g. 8.3 (which is now EOL) then the latest ports tree will no longer compile due to missing features in make and a missing native unzip.

The following will get it all working again.

First update make with a copy from 8.4 (this assumes your running amd64:

Last year we posted our Caching Steam Downloads @ LAN’s article which has been adopted by many of the LAN event organisers in the community as the baseline for improving download speeds and helping avoid internet saturation when you have 10’s – 1000’s of gamers at events all updating and installing new games from Steam.

This rework builds on the original concepts from our steam caching, brings in additional improvements from the community, such as the excellent work by the guys @ http://churchnerd.net/ as as well as other enhancements.

Requirements
Due to the features used in this configuration it requires nginx 1.6.0+ which is the latest stable release at the time of writing.

Nginx Configuration
In order to make the configuration more maintainable we’ve split the config up in to a number of smaller includes.

machines/lancache-single.conf
In the machines directory you have lancache-single.conf which is the main nginx.conf file that sets up the events and http handler as well as the key features via includes: custom log format, cache definition and active vhosts.

lancache/log_format
The custom log format adds three additional details to the standard combined log format “$upstream_cache_status” “$host” “$http_range”. These are useful for determine the efficiency of each segment the cache.

lancache/caches
In order to support the expanding number of downloads supported by LANcache we’ve switched the config from static mirror to using nginx’s built in caching.

In our install we’re caching data to 6 x 240GB SSD’s configured in ZFS RAIDZ so we have just over 1TB of storage per node.
To ensure we don’t run out of space we’ve limited the main installs cache size to 950GB with custom loader details to ensure we can init the cache quicker on restart.
The other cache zone is used for none install data so is limited to just 10GB.

We also set proxy_temp_path to a location on the same volume as the cache directories so that temporary files can be moved directly to the cache directory avoid a file copy which would put extra stress on the IO subsystem.

sites/lancache-single.conf
Here we define individual server entries for each service we’ll be caching, we do this so that each service can configure how its cache works independently.
In order to allow for direct use of the configs in multiple setups without having to edit the config files themselves we made use of named entries for all listen addresses.

The example below shows the origin server entry which listens on lancache-origin and requires the spoof entries akamai.cdn.ea.com.

We use server_name as part of the cache_key to avoid cache collisions and so add _ as the wildcard catch all to ensure all requests to this servers IP are processed.

The include is where all the custom work is done, in this case lancache/node-origin. There are currently 5 different flavours of node: blizzard, default, origin, pass and steam.

lancache/node-origin
Origin’s CDN is pretty bad in that currently prevents the caching of data, due to this we’re force to ignore the Cache-Control and Expires headers. The files themselves are very large 10GB+ and the client uses range requests to chunk the downloads to improve performance and provide realistic download restart points.

By default nginx proxy translates a GET request with a Range request to a full download by stripping the Range and If-Range request headers from the upstream request. It does this so subsequent range requests can be satisfied from the single download request. Unfortunately Origin’s CDN prevents this so we have to override this default behaviour by passing through the Range and If-Range headers. This means the upstream will reply with a 206 (partial content) instead of a 200 (OK) response and hence we must add the range to the cache key so that additional requests are correctly.

The final customisation for Origin is to use $uri in the proxy_cache_key, we do this as the Origin client uses a query string parameter sauth=<key>

lancache/node-blizzard
Blizzard have large downloads too, so to ensure that requests are served quickly we cache 206 responses in the same way as for Origin.

lancache/node-steam
All Steam downloads are located under /depot/ so we have a custom location for that which ignores the Expires header as Steam sets a default Expires header.

We also store the content of requests /serverlists/ as these requests served by cs.steampowered.com give us information about hosts used by Steam to process download request. The information in these files could help identify future DNS entries which need spoofing.

Finally the catch all / entry caches all other items according to the their headers.

lancache/node-default
This is the default which is used for riot, hirez and sony it uses standard caching rules which caches based on the proxy_cache_key "$server_name$request_uri"

Required DNS entries
All of the required DNS entries are for each service are documented their block server in vhosts/lancache-single.conf which as of writing is:Steamlancache-steam cs.steampowered.com *.cs.steampowered.com content1.steampowered.com content2.steampowered.com content3.steampowered.com content4.steampowered.com content5.steampowered.com content6.steampowered.com content7.steampowered.com content8.steampowered.com *.hsar.steampowered.com.edgesuite.net *.akamai.steamstatic.com content-origin.steampowered.com client-download.steampowered.com

You’ll notice that each entry starts with lancache-XXXX this is entry used in the listen directive so no editing of the config is required for IP allocation to each service. As we’re creating multiple server entries and each is capturing hostnames using the _ wildcard each service must have its own IP e.g. lancache-steam = 10.10.100.100, lancache-riot = 10.10.100.101, lancache-blizzard = 10.10.100.102, lancache-hirez = 10.10.100.103, lancache-origin = 10.10.100.104 and lancache-sony = 10.10.100.105

Hardware Specifications
At Insomnia 51 we used a hybrid of this configuration which made use of two machines working in a cluster with the following spec:

Dual Hex Core CPU’s

128GB RAM

6 x 240GB SSD’s ZFS RAIDZ

6 x 1Gbps Nics

OS – FreeBSD 10.0

These machines where configured in a failover pair using CARP @ 4Gbps lagg using LACP. Each node served ~1/2 of the active cache set to double the available cache space to ~1.8TB, with internode communication done on using a dedicated 2Gbps lagg

LANcache Stats from Insomnia 51
For those that are interested at its initial outing at Insomnia 51 LANcache:

If you’re installing Battle.Net, required and installed as the initial part of Blizzard games such as Starcraft II & Hearthstone, and the installer fails with the message:

Whoops! Looks like something broke. Error Code: 2600

This can be caused by a bad download, which can be the result of a proxied web connection.

Proxies, particularly caching proxies, can translates the Blizzard downloaders HTTP request with the Range header into a full request, which is subsequently returned as is to the client i.e. 200 OK response containing the full file. The downloader was expecting a 206 Partial Content response but appears to only check for 20X response, hence it doesn’t spot the issue and builds its full file incorrectly.

To make matters worse the downloader stores this file in the Windows temporary directory and doesn’t delete it either on failure or before trying to download it again such as if the installer is restarted.

If you’re using nginx prior to 1.5.3 as a caching proxy then this will happen if your the first person to download the file, after which 206 responses are correctly returned for Range requests using the cached file. This behaviour was changed in 1.5.3 when an enhancement to return 206 for on the fly caching responses was added. To be clear this isn’t technically a bug in nginx, the spec allows for a server to return 200 OK response to a Range request, its the Blizzard downloader that’s at fault for not correctly processing 200 OK then its expecting 206 Partial Content.

If you have your Battle.Net installer bugged like this simply delete the Blizzard directory from your Windows temporary directory %TEMP% and re-run the installer after fixing or disabling your proxy.